Patients visiting a hospital can have a multitude of medical conditions, which may be treated simultaneously or in different time periods. As a result, the medical record of a patient can grow in size and complexity, which makes it difficult for specialists to find information that is important for setting up a treatment plan. They have to go through the search process manually, and may not notice important information due to the overwhelming size of the patient file.
Existing document management systems are able to display the documents in a patient record by their date of creation or date of last change. Moreover, automatic generation of a timeline with icons representing documents generated, is known in the art. Also, sorting functionality may be provided, for example in alphabetical order according to the filename.
“The Evolution of an Integrated Timeline for Oncology Patient Healthcare”, by A. A. T. Bui et al., Proc. AMIA Symp. 1998:165-9, PMID: 9929203, discloses an infrastructure for the creation of an integrated multimedia timeline that automatically combines patient information from distributed hospital information sources. Documents retrieved by a prefetch monitor are classified using schemes and data models to determine appropriate inclusion into document timelines. A document can appear in several document timelines if it matches different document categories. For example, a thoracic radiology report on lung cancer may appear in both a pulmonary document timeline and an oncology document timeline.
However, these existing document systems have a drawback in that it is not easy to find the right document from the document list or timeline. Also, information may be overlooked, because it is not clear which documents may contain important information.